2/12/2009 @ 6:00AM

The Greatest Inventors You've Never Heard Of

The National Inventors Hall of Fame has named its 15 inductees for the 2009. They all contributed fundamental advances to the making of the world we now live in. Yet, chances are you have never heard of most, if not all, of them. That is how it is for inventors, most of the time.

These are people who made the information revolution. The Hall of Fame, which has inducted more than 300 men and women since its founding in 1974, decided this year to focus specifically on inventions connected with, or growing out of, the integrated circuit, which turns 50 this year. These are the progenitors of basic advances integral to the personal computer, the Internet and everything else that goes along with those technologies.

I was there at the announcement on Wednesday in Washington, D.C., because I am not only an editor at Forbes but also the vice president for selection of the NIHF. I get to know these remarkable and fascinating, if underappreciated, inventors.

The integrated circuit was born in 1959, when both Jack Kilby of
Texas Instruments
and Robert Noyce of
Fairchild Semiconductor
filed for patents on versions of it. A decade earlier, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain had invented the transistor. A decade later, Marcian “Ted” Hoff, Stanley Mazor and Federico Faggin invented the microprocessor–the computer chip.

Those giants have all already been inducted. This year’s list includes Jean Hoerni, who invented the process used to make virtually all transistors today; John Atalla and Dawon Kahng, who gave the world the first working field-effect transistors; and Carver Mead, who found a way to raise the number of transistors in a space the width of a human hair from seven to 300. Six of the nine living new inductees attended Wednesday’s announcement, along with a handful of earlier inductees in the same field.

What are such people like, those who have changed the world in such essential ways? Insatiably curious and restless for the most part, judging from what they chat about when they are together. Mazor has built a house, modeled on a French chateau, out of recycled styrofoam packing peanuts, along with rebar and concrete. He has outfitted it with all-green energy technology, and he has published a book about it. Hoff, Mazor’s co-inventor, is working on innovative desalination technology in his own attempt to make the world a little greener.

On the other hand, Dov Frohman-Bentchkowsky, a cheerful Israeli with a long white beard who is being inducted this year for EPROM–erasable programmable read-only memory–just loves being retired. I asked him how he invented, what the key to his creativity was. He did not have a clue. “I have no idea how I work,” he said. “It’s a little like daydreaming.”

Without the creativity of these men, we would have no personal computers or cell phones or digital cameras or Internet or BlackBerrys or–the list is interminable. The world without what they did is hard to imagine. So why are they so little known, even figures as world changing as Hoff and Mazor, outside of the industry they are in?

It is not a question I have ever heard any of them ask. They all seem to be too engaged with their world to indulge such a concern. Of course, it is partly because we live in an age of complex inventions worked out by many people in concert, most often at big companies. None of these men labored alone or named a business after himself. Furthermore, what they created was not consumer products but the technologies that make those products possible. And you could argue that they have given rise to technologies that have shortened our attention spans, so we remember less of everything. But, seriously, I think their relative anonymity is largely a matter of the nature of technology itself.

Most inventions reach their pinnacle of success when they come to be taken completely for granted. You want an air conditioner so quiet and dependable that you are unaware it is running. You want a car that always starts right up in any weather and almost never needs servicing, so you do not ever have to give it a thought. You want a medication that is painless and effortless to administer and works fully, fast and without side effects.

In other words, one reason these men are so unknown–and people do not even wonder who they are–is because their inventions have worked so well. Their innovations have reached the zenith of invisibility. Their anonymity is a sign not of failure but of triumph. What they have done has been woven so thoroughly into the fabric of our lives that we are no longer even amazed by all the miracles their inventions encompass.

Still, the people at the NIHF love to honor these inventors and make a noise about them. After all, if there is anything America needs now, we all agree, it is a new generation inspired to become inventors like these and to enrich the nation and the world the way these men have done.

Here are the 2009 inductees into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. They will be inducted at a ceremony in Silicon Valley on May 2: